FIRST TRUST ADVISORS LP

First Trust Advisors L.P., along with its affiliate First Trust Portfolios L.P., was founded in 1991 and, collectively, is known as First Trust. The company’s core investment principals are focused on transparency to its clients, focusing on its investments based on consistency and certainty in the long run, discipline in making its investment decisions based solely on research, making sure that portfolios are acting as intended in original allocations through rebalancing, and minimizing taxes. First Trust Advisors is focused on individuals and high net worth individuals, but its diverse client base include investment companies, charities, foundations, endowments, retirement systems, pension and profit plans, municipalities, and insurance companies. The firm manages equity, balanced, and fixed income portfolios and manages both mutual funds and exchange traded funds. Its line of mutual funds includes the First Trust Preferred Securities and Income Fund, Short Duration High Income Fund, and Small Cap Value Fund. Its line of exchange traded funds, offered in a much wider variety compared to their mutual funds, include the First Trust CBOE S&P 500 VIX Tail Hedge Fund, Global Tactical Commodity Strategy Fund, Dow Jones Global Select Dividend Index Fund, NASDAQ Technology Dividend Index Fund, ISE-Revere Natural Gas Index Fund, and ISE Global Wind Energy Index Fund ETFs, among many others. The company currently has over $105 billion in total assets under management, $43 billion of which are discretionary assets and the rest non-discretionary assets, which are split across over 4200 accounts, balancing out to each account containing about $25 million. The company’s total assets under management has grown almost exponentially since 2010 from about $18 billion to well over five times that amount today, although total accounts under its management has actually decreased from over 6000 five years ago to its current amount. First Trust Advisors employs 418 employees as of 2015 to look after these accounts.